SPOTLIGHT: Plant Genome Editing Facility
Pubblicato il: 23.04.2021 10:00
Plants and other photosynthetic organisms drastically shaped the environment of our planet, producing all the oxygen now present in the atmosphere. Plants always played a central role in human history as a versatile source of food but also energy, materials, and drugs. The study of plants is thus fundamental to understand the evolution of living organisms but also to respond to the major challenges of our humanity for next few decades such as the increase in global population and climate change.
The Department of Biology hosts 14 faculty members active in plant biology and in 2020 invested in the formation of a new Plant Genome Editing (PGE) facility. Genome editing technologies, whose discovery has just been awarded with the noble prize to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, are revolutionizing research approaches in many fields of life science including plant biology. It is thus strategic to organize efforts to keep being up-to-date and to make these technologies available to all plant biology groups. PGE is born to support the genome editing experiments in photosynthetic organisms in terms of experiment design, cell culture and transformation, transformant isolation and genotyping, plant cultivation, phenotyping and maintenance of collections of lines / plants / material. As example, PGE is organizing and maintaining the equipment for plant growth and transformation, providing support in the design of guide RNAs, transformation and user training for the for the transformation and phenotyping.
Location:
PGE facility is located at 4th floor room 13
Instruments available:
- Cell culture and plant cultivation: 13 growth chambers with different illumination / temperature / humidity and light regime;
- Transformation: particle gun (Beambio) and electroporator(ECM® 630 Electroporator);
- Phenotyping: Fluorcam (Photon System Instruments) closed and open, stereomicroscope with camera;
Personnel:
Director: Prof. Tomas Morosinotto;
Technical staff:
Full time: Alessandra Bellan;
Parti time: Elisabetta Barizza, Luca Cesarotto, Stefania Marcato, Anna Pavanello, Anna Segalla;
Service Booking and contacts:
For inquiries, booking and access authorization, please contact: pge.biologia@unipd.it
